Condole punish and reimagine security

Condole punish and reimagine security

For response aligned to India’s global weight.

We condemn the dastardly terrorist attack on a convoy of the Central Reserve Police Force that killed more than 40 members of the force. The suicide bomber who drove an explosive-laden vehicle into a bus claimed to be a member of the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), in a video circulated after the attack. The JeM has owned up the attack as well. Pakistan cannot shirk its responsibility for hosting a terror outfit that sponsors attacks in India. Not just India, the entire international community must hold Pakistan accountable for its use of terror outfits as means of strategic depth. Rather than the Uighurs, those in need of re-education are Chinese policymakers who aid and abet Pakistan and its military intelligence in their use of terror as state policy.

India’s response must be firm, effective and intelligent. Removing Pakistan’s most-favoured-nation (MFN) status is okay but lacks bite. This is the time to bring all of India’s diplomatic clout into play, leverage the global convergence of opinion against terror and apply sufficient pressure on Pakistan to make it hand over leaders of JeM to India. India is a big power but also fully alive to the responsibility that goes with being a nuclear power. Any use of force must be calibrated to have decisive impact that would be self-contained and would not lead to escalation. Action also has to be internal, and remedial. That the amount of explosives that caused such a huge blast could escape detection while being transported in a sports utility vehicle calls for review of search and intelligence systems that are in place.

To be comprehensive, the review must not shirk questioning the efficacy of trying to resolve the political problem in Kashmir by means of force alone. India’s security forces have been deployed to wage war against their own countrymen in Kashmir, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and the northeast, shedding and spilling blood — futile, Indian blood, for far too long. The point is to put in practice a politics that would get us off the spiral of violence and absorb discontent into India’s material and cultural bounty, present and growing.